Top-tier professional golf is in turmoil and it’s tiring, boring and potentially bad for grassroots golf.
OPINION
It’s been said for a while now that professional golf is a different game from the one everyone else plays. The enormous distances, overweight golf bags, unnaturally manicured fairways and incredible skillsets make for an unfamiliar sport. On the odd occasion, I’ve been able to attend some of these big tournaments, it’s a different world. A travelling circus. A freak show of truly remarkable golf.
And right now it feels like it’s not just a different game, but a game played on a different planet. If it felt unfamiliar before, now it’s a completely unrecognisable mess that is mired in a grab for vast sums of cash, and one even further removed from the game I love.
In short, I think many Australian golf fans are fine with the shake-up of professional golf. For too long, big-time tournament golf in Australia has been neglected; forced to die a slow death thanks to the wrap-around season and big money offered by the monopolising US PGA Tour.
But it turns out “big money” is a relative term. The big top has been blown off one circus and landed on an even bigger one with more sparkle, more noise, more clowns and much, much more money.
It was clear the shake-up wasn’t going to happen without a disturbance in the force, and we’re ok with that. But not like this. Not one funded by blood money.
The fear is it will become less interesting, less exciting – all at the expense of the game I love.
And right now it’s all a little tiring. Rich people, rich nerds squabbling over unimaginable sums of money. It gets boring after a while.
The biggest problem for most of us golfers on Planet Earth is that it plays on the false prejudices already in play by those who wish to see golf courses disappear altogether.
The erroneous view that golf is a game played by rich people in private, exclusive golf courses will become more entrenched and embolden more people to shut down more golf.
And as we’ve seen it won’t be the private, exclusive golf courses that will be targeted, it will be the public, open access, grassroots golf courses that run at a sliver of the cost of the private golf course. And a grain of sand compared to the big money talked about under the big top of the Studio 54 tour.
I’m exasperated to think I don’t really care.
I care of course that the money comes from a despotic regime, and I care enough to think that just because other sports turn a blind eye to the ethics of funding a sports league with blood money, it doesn’t mean that golf should. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.
But it seems like the faraway, intangible palaver between despots, bigots, and nerds who have come into swathes of money no matter what the cost. It doesn’t feel like it has anything to do with golf I know.
I’ve found myself yearning for a few days of golf at some isolated country course. Give me mottled fairways, damp bunkers and scrape greens. Give me a day off work, give me mates, and a couple of locals brews in an unrenovated, clown-less clubhouse.
I want to get as far away from big-top golf as possible. It’s tiresome, messy and is now being played out in courtrooms instead of the fairways.
I want Stableford, bad grips, old golf balls and the occasional par. Cold tops, less big tops. Golf for the liv love of it.
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